WHAT DO YOU WANT? PART II

Were I a young man, I'd be looking for a job with a company who would send me abroad.  I'd tell them right up front, "Send me anywhere, I'm ready to go."  Experience is the root of all knowledge, and can be a life adventure so critical to finding out what you really want.  Were I even young enough to be college age, I'd be looking for a place to go in a foreign country.  Some colleges in Mexico have started English language programs, but it would be neat to pick up another language like Spanish, French, or whatever.  If my job, the way I earned money, could be done at home via computers, I'd find another country to do that from.

There's a guy out there, former military officer turned international voyager, who posts blogs from countries he visits.  After visiting some fifty countries, he chose Tibet as home base.  That's not for me, but at least it's an adventure.  Most Americans are ignorant of world geography, have no idea where most countries are located.  I took on the study of world geography as a hobby many years ago, so if someone mentions Uruguay, I know where it is and a little about it.  And I talk to people all the time who've never heard of Morocco, think it's some kind of pottery or weird hat.  France is in the news all the time, and when I told a friend where it was located, he said, "I thought it was an island."

One of my favorite students from back in my teaching days was a man, a former army officer from Iran, who was sick of being called an Arab.  He'd politely explain that he wasn't an Arab but was Persian.  "Iran, Iraq, what the hell's the difference?" a question he often got.  When the summer olympics were going on in London just over four years ago, the news covered some of the sites there. They interviewed a Beefeater, one of the top guards at the Tower of London.  He was asked what the strangest question he'd ever been asked was, and he said a lady from Texas once asked him if the Tower of London was where they kept Snow White prisoner.  He said no, that Snow White was fiction.  As the woman walked away with her husband, she was overheard saying, "I know that's where she was a prisoner."  That left me shaking my head.  She just had to be from Texas, my home state.  And the sad thing is, I could walk down on main street and tell that story to someone, and they're probably ask, "Well, was she?"

My advice is to free yourself from the confines of ignorance.  Learn geography, and if you can, do it in person.  You might find some place that feels like home, and it might look even better to you if the home you knew here is falling down.